Various production machines are presently available in the shrimp processing industry for processing shrimp. Examples of these shrimp processing machines are disclosed in Jonsson, U.S. Pat. No. 3,247,542 and Betts, U.S. Pat. No. 4,769,871. Shrimp are fed to the processing machines by an operator who places the shrimp in a plurality of trays. The feed trays are attached to a conveyor belt which transports the shrimp to a rotatable transport wheel. Clamp assemblies on the wheel are actuated to grasp a shrimp and remove it from a tray and transport it to various work stations where the shrimp shell is cut, and the shell and vein are removed from the shrimp.
To efficiently process the shrimp past the various work stations, it is important that a shrimp be properly located in a rotating clamp assembly. Further, it is important that a shrimp be properly oriented in a feed tray whereby it can be grasped by the clamping assembly. If a shrimp is not properly oriented in the feed tray, a clamp assembly will not properly engage the shrimp, which serves to cause a number of problems. One problem arises in that the body or meat portion of a shrimp has only limited structural strength which is weakest at the portion where the tail adjoins the shrimp body. If a shrimp is improperly grasped by a clamp assembly due to the fact that the shrimp is seated improperly in a tray, the body may tear during shell removal. Further, if improper shrimp alignment occurs in a clamp assembly, the shell and shrimp body may be cut in the wrong location, resulting in improper shell, vein and/or meat removal. Improper shrimp orientation on the tray can lead to either the destruction of a shrimp during the processing operation or an increased production cost due to the fact that the shrimp must be reprocessed.
Various methods have been employed to facilitate proper orientation of shrimp in the feed trays. Typically, a visual marking has been placed on the tray whereby an operator can orient the shrimp on the tray by locating the shrimp relative to the marking. Markings of this type are disclosed, for example, in Jonsson, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,247,542 and 3,277,517. This visible orientation system, however, has not been entirely satisfactory. While the visual markings provide for a gross adjustment in positioning a shrimp on a tray, the operator's positioning procedure sometimes is quite subjective in locating a shrimp relative to the visual marking on the tray. Thus, there remains a need for an improved device and method which will ensure a more consistent and correct orientation of a shrimp on a feed tray. What is particularly desired is to have a means for providing both a gross and discrete adjustment of a shrimp on a feed tray whereby a shrimp will be properly positioned on a tray so that it can be grasped by a clamp assembly on a rotatable transport wheel and delivered to various work stations which ultimately will produce consistently properly processed shrimp meat.